The Gold Eaters Read online

  “Because he likes the whores!” Candía barks, sorry he wasn’t quicker to volunteer himself. “You know they’ll kill you, Molina? Wasn’t it you drew first blood on the Indian ship? The survivors probably came back here. They won’t have forgotten.”

  “I only tickled that big fellow’s tattoo! Anyway, they can’t know which of us did what. To them we’re all alike.”

  —

  With nightfall Tomás is allowed to bring Waman on deck—so long as he is laced into the weighted jacket and never left alone. A fingernail of moon has risen over the desert. The boy goes to the side and swallows great draughts of air. The African tells of his day ashore, adding that Pizarro has surprised everyone by deciding to sail next morning. Hopes crushed, the interpreter bends over the rail and weeps into black water.

  Tomás’s hand on his shoulder. “Don’t worry, Felipe. The ship goes south. Maybe the Commander will put in at your home village. Anyway, he must come back here soon.” Waman listens in dismay to the news that Molina will be left in Tumbes, alone. He had not foreseen this: a rival interpreter so quickly. “Mama Killa,” he prays silently to the slim crescent, “let the ship stop where I can flee. May it be so.”

  It is late now. Only the brightest stars can be seen in a sky fogged by dust and moonglow. Here and there a few lights sparkle on the dark skin of land and city. There is a smell of fish and doused fires. Phosphorescence blooms in the water wherever a wave licks a mooring or the piles of the dock.

  The Spaniards are leaving Ruiz’s cabin, heading for hammocks and berths. Molina is suddenly beside him at the rail.

  “How now, Felipe!”

  “I hear we sail tomorrow,” Waman replies bleakly. “And I hear you’re staying ashore.”

  Molina grunts.

  “Tell Pizarro you have to take me with you!”

  “I’d like that. But he won’t. You know it as well as I do.”

  “If you get a chance,” the boy goes on, “would you do one thing for me? Would you go and see my family? Tell them I live, that I’m well. Tell them I’m not free, but will come to them soon as I can. Above all, tell them I love them. And say I’m sorry.”

  “Sorry? What for?”

  “Not now. When we’re back.”

  “I can’t make promises . . .” Molina’s voice dies away. He stares a long time at the dark city, as if beginning to regret his choice. “Anything might happen over there.”

  “If you can’t go yourself, have the goodness to ask the All-Seer to send a message. Will you do that?”

  “How can I? I don’t speak a word of the language.”

  “I’ve already taught you a few.”

  “What! Yes and no and what’s your name?”

  “They live in a village called Little River,” Waman persists. “Huchuy Mayu, we say. It’s about twenty tupu south by the new road—under a hundred miles. You can count the marker stones.” Saying this, giving these directions, makes the plan seem less unlikely. Almost as if Waman could be making the journey himself.

  “If you’re careful,” he adds, “all will go well for you over there. This is a good place.”

  “I think so too, Felipe.” The Spaniard pats the interpreter’s head. “I’ll do what you ask, if I can.”

  That night, chained in the hold, Waman pulls some threads from his breechclout, the new one his mother made. He twists them together, splicing the ends to make a string. Each sound in the language has a knot. He ties the only ones he knows, for W and M and N. Waman: Hawk: himself.

  In the morning, in the farewell flurry as Molina is embraced by his fellows, blessed by Ruiz, and makes ready to go ashore, Waman presses this tiny quipu into his hand.

  “Give this when you find my family in Little River. With this they will know you. They will treat you well. Like one of them.”

  5

  What better way to learn a language than in bed?” Lady Sian observes to the All-Seer in his private quarters, where they have met to review the progress of the barbarian left behind last month. The All-Seer’s orders from the Emperor are to treat the man as a guest and make sure he learns some Quechua quickly. That done, he will be sent to Tumipampa, or even Cusco, for questioning. To this end, the Governor has found Molina lodgings with a young widow.

  “Imagine,” she adds. “That hairy monkey in her arms.”

  The All-Seer chuckles. These lowlanders are always so earthy. Always joking about love. And the rest of the time they’re doing it. Anything one can think of, to judge from their erotic pots. He looks up at the niches on the far wall of the room, each filled with a good piece from his own collection. All startling. And some quite old. From a world before this World.

  “I hear the barbarian’s looking more human now,” the All-Seer says. “They tell me she’s plucked out all his whiskers. This work for the Empire seems to be taking her mind off her loss. I gather she’s . . . applying herself.”

  The All-Seer offers the Governor some more grilled tuna and refills their tankards himself. His helpers have been given the night off. He is simply dressed, showing her his private face: warm, confiding, thoughtful, the taut skin over his cheekbones creased in mirth.

  Perhaps, she thinks, he still has hopes of her. Let him. It’s no bad thing to be admired by a Yupanki, a member of the Empire’s ruling clan. She knows better than to let him catch her.

  “No wonder she’s bathing that creature so well! Although . . .” The Governor lets the thought drop.

  “What? You know you can speak freely.”

  “The Empire is a great thing,” Lady Sian continues. “But—between ourselves—I’m not sure it has a place in people’s bedrooms.”

  “Maybe not.” The All-Seer gives her a stiff bow. “But it was the widow’s own idea to become more than the barbarian’s landlady.”

  “What if she grows too fond of him? She might take his side and fail to report as she should.”

  “The woman is reliable. Some traders on that ship the barbarians attacked were kin of hers. Anyway, her main task is to teach him the language. Whatever we fail to learn here the Emperor’s men will get out of him later.”

  The Governor nods, wishing she had been less outspoken. “What will you do if his shipmates come back for him too soon?”

  “They won’t. They’ve sailed a long way down the coast. Last I heard they were nearly at Chincha. Our people there have been told to keep them entertained as long as possible.”

  Molina, too, is in no hurry to see his shipmates. Here in Tumbes he’s a new man, a somebody, an hidalgo. Respect and long looks wherever he goes. Especially from women. And what luck to be taken on by this one!

  One of the things Molina likes about Peru is that the custom of siesta is observed. He and his hostess, whose name is Yutu, are sharing a double hammock strung between the avocado trees that shade her patio. She is fast asleep, her chest swelling and falling rhythmically beneath thin cotton. He looks on her fondly and uncuriously, as men do with a woman whose body they’ve explored. His eyes linger on her upturned nose. Yutu—some sort of bird, no? A partridge? Something pretty. He likes her birdlike eyes, black and shiny. And her skin: bronze, sleek, hairless. Yet such a lovely head of hair, straight and glossy as the tail of a fine black mare. He loves how it sweeps his chest when she throws him on his back and rides him. So many things she’s taught him! Things that would send a lesser man to the confessional. Or to the stocks.

  Fine house too. Living like a wealthy Moor, waited on by servants, eating fish or meat every day. Picking up the lingo. Even starting to like the beer—a sure sign a man’s settling in. And all this scrubbing and plucking. Each hair tweezered from his hide by Yutu until, with his moreno looks and the tunic she’s lent him, he just about passes for a local. He can’t have been this clean since a midwife wiped him down when he came into the world.

  A cold sea-breath lops into the courtyard, chatterin
g the leaves, chilling Molina’s bare chest. His mind strays to Castilian winters, to the freezing orphanage where his mother left him the night she ran away. Away with whom? His father? He doubts she even knew who his father was. Some randy knave no doubt, as quick with his prick as with his knife. Some knave like him.

  Free of all but memories. At least, he feels free here, though Yutu’s no fool, never letting him wander far. Still, it’s a great thing to be her lover instead of a footslogger for that piss-eyed bully Pizarro. Not for the first time Molina asks himself why he crossed the line on Gallo Island. Ah, yes: gambling debts in Panama, and several husbands and fathers who would see him flayed.

  “Badluck Molina,” they used to call him in Spain. But no one knows that in Peru. Three months here now, the best of his life. Pizarro can take his time.

  —

  Molina and Yutu are strolling through the streets one evening when they hear a loud noise in the air. A howl of lamentation like a thousand lonely dogs.

  Molina’s first thought is that Pizarro must have come back for him at last and committed some outrage—some slaughter on the beach. Yutu grasps his hand and pulls him along, listening, saying nothing, heading for the square. The two have a hard time getting through the throng.

  In the middle of the plaza imperial guardsmen have formed a ring, holding the crowd back with small shields and pikes. Inside the ring, sitting on a stone seat by the fountain, is an old man with long white hair. In his hands is a message of coloured strings hanging from a thick black cord.

  “This means death,” Yutu says in Molina’s ear.

  “¡Vámonos!” he shouts in hers, suspecting his shipmates and fearing for his life. “Haku!” Let’s be gone.

  She laces her fingers into his, tightening her grip. “We stay. And I listen.”

  “The news will be repeated,” guards are calling. “The news will be repeated. Those who have heard should leave and make room for others.”

  The old man gathers himself for yet another reading, calling out in a voice of surprising strength and authority:

  “Uyariwaychik. All hear me. This is now made known. Our Emperor Wayna Qhapaq has died, suddenly, in the thirty-fourth year of his reign.” He pauses, while another howl of mourning fills the square; then resumes running his fingers over the knots.

  Molina can’t follow much. Where has their king died? And how? Could it be the work of Pizarro? Some other Spaniards?

  Yutu repeats everything slowly and simply for him back at her house. The Emperor—the Sapa Inka, or Only King—fell ill from a plague without name, a sickness never seen before. This pestilence first appeared in mountain towns on the Empire’s northern border a few weeks ago, spreading quickly through Quito Province to the city of Tumipampa, where the Emperor was residing. Of twelve thousand high officials, army commanders, lords, ladies, retainers, and royal children in the palace at the time, ten thousand fell ill. More than six thousand have died.

  It was hoped Wayna Qhapaq might be saved by isolation—alone in a small house in the palace gardens. But after ten days condors began alighting on the roof. Then the people knew their Only King was dead.

  The Emperor is to be embalmed and taken to Cusco, where he will live forever in the house of his father, the Sun.

  Molina knows at once what it is: the smallpox.

  —

  They came for him the next day, two big soldiers at Yutu’s door. Next thing he knew he was frogmarched from the house—toes barely scraping the ground—and thrown in jail.

  He sighs and scratches the stubble in his armpits. He should have known his luck wouldn’t last. Sooner or later the fates always empty a pail of shit on Badluck Molina’s head. Daylight begins to show in the cell’s high window. A window barely big enough for a cat, but a highway for the sodding mosquitoes, who have given him another sleepless night. The light taunts him. What is daylight without freedom? Only a change of torments: mosquitoes by night; flies by day.

  He is kept in solitary. Each morning cornbread is slid under the door and water trickles into a jar from a spout in the wall. Eventually a jailer comes to clean the cell, a masked man wreathed in incense from a small brazier worn on his chest as a precaution.

  Sometimes this man rouses him in the night for questioning by the All-Seer—a disembodied voice from behind a sheet. Here for your own protection. Ha! If that’s the reason, why is the old buzzard grilling him with endless questions, expecting him to speak their lingo perfectly? I can curse in it, eat in it, and fuck in it. That’s about all Yutu got into my head.

  —

  He tracks the days with scratches on his wall. He listens to the unseen street beyond the window. Why hasn’t Yutu come? He misses her, finds it painful to think of her, of the good days at her house. Sometimes he hears a woman’s voice in the street that might be hers. But he can never make out words.

  His hairiness grows back, his beard and a dark pelt on chest and thighs. His skin turns grey for want of sunlight. Loneliness and despair settle on him like ash. Molina fears nothing from the plague himself. Smallpox visited the orphanage when he was five or six, as it did every few years. Same with measles, mumps, chickenpox. Many children died, but the rest never caught those things again.

  His mind often returns to Spain, awake and in dreams. What he would give to see his shipmates now! He yearns to hear Castilian, a lute, for a taste of wine, a card game with Candía—one of the few he got along with. He even prays, a thing he does only when hope forsakes him. He tallies up his scratches on the wall. More than a month now. More than four since Pizarro sailed away. A long time. Maybe they too are in a Peruvian jail, rotting in a hole like this somewhere down the coast.

  The All-Seer seems to believe that the arrival of the new sickness and the Spaniards is no coincidence. Molina has denied this, pointing out there was no plague on his ship and it did not begin in Tumbes. But to himself he admits it might well have made its way south from Mexico or Panama, through hotlands and highlands until it burst into the Peruvian Empire.

  Molina gathers that the pestilence still rages, despite all efforts to contain it. The authorities have given it a name, the spotted death, and described its early symptoms. Movement on the highways has been forbidden. No ships are allowed to sail. The postal service is suspended, except for imperial business at the highest level.

  Yet already the smallpox has spread south through the highlands to the distant capital. It can’t be long before it sweeps down into each coastal valley, even though this land is so vast, so rugged. Molina recalls asking Yutu how long it would take to walk to Cusco. She said people in no hurry allow a month and a half, but the postmen can get there in five days. That seemed impossible. Now he knows better. Perhaps that’s how it spread so quickly, with the mail.

  For some days he hears bustle in the street beyond his window: the slap of many sandals, the shouts of soldiers, the soft tread and clicking toes of llamas.

  Then no more. Only dogs howling by night. Only a hiss and flutter of big wings by day. And on the air a stink of death.

  His captors have died or fled, leaving him here like a rat in a jar.

  His cell door is a sturdy affair of hard timber, fastened outside by a thick metal bar through stone rings. No hope there. His only chance is to dig through the adobe wall, which he judges from the window opening to be about three feet thick. Molina snaps the rim off his water pot. With the shard he scrapes away a patch of plaster, exposing brickwork—big adobes of mud and gravel, laid with clay. He manages to dislodge a sharp stone the shape of a mango pit. With this he works at the joint. By nightfall he has loosened one brick, pulled it free with bleeding fingers. The work goes better the following day. The bricklayers were sparing with mortar in the core. By sundown he’s wrenched out a dozen bricks, leaving only the street side undisturbed. When he kicks those away he will be free.

  Molina breaks out in the thick of night, lit by a t
hief’s moon, enough to see without being seen. He is tempted to raid a house for food, but shrinks from the reek at every door. And there are dogs, growling in gutters or sloping along behind him, lost and searching for their owners. He slips a hand into a pocket of his jerkin, checking for the tiny string with three knots given him by Felipe. Still there. Thank Christ the All-Seer let him keep his clothes, though his boots were taken and he has only rags to bind his feet. He will go south by the great road to Huchuy Mayu and look for the boy’s family. If they haven’t died or fled like the citizens of Tumbes. Little River sounds like a small place, out of the way, fanned by sea winds. Perhaps they have been spared.

  Once well beyond the fields Molina feels safe enough to slake his thirst at the roadside canal and eat from trees planted along the Emperor’s highway. The low fruit is gone—in all the world it’s always so!—but he knocks down some avocados with a stick. Also a custard apple and carob pods filled with a pith like sherbet.

  He is in foothills now, in thorny scrub above the watered valley. He slips over a side wall and naps on the soft screef, awakening to mad laughter: parrots. For a while he makes his way laboriously through the bush, but soon abandons this precaution. There are no other wayfarers. Even the posthouses every few miles are unmanned.

  Around noon on the third day, he spots movement far ahead on a shining shield of heat. Travellers? Troops? Or a trick of the light?

  It is a flock of vultures, hopping and tearing at the bodies of a man and woman. He hurls stones at the big birds, who draw back insolently, without taking to the air. The elderly couple are side by side, face down, their dead lips sunk in the cool water of the roadside channel. They have not been there long, perhaps only two days. Molina lifts the man’s tunic, sees the craterous pustules that erupted from the flesh like a thousand tiny volcanoes.

  He searches the bodies, finding a bag of toasted corn and slices of dried sweet potato. He pops the earspools from the man’s stretched lobes—small ones of gold alloy. Worth having all the same. As are the beads in the woman’s braids. Unwinding his foot rags, he tries on the dead man’s shoes. They fit.